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Game Lengths: Do They Affect Replay Value?

Hello all,

Now I'm a huge fan of long games. I have a large list of games that I've spent over 200 hours on and the list just grows longer. I'm that kind of player who will level grind until I can't anymore, and strive to get every single mission and item in the game. I love 100%-ing games. I like to get the full value out of the game when I get one. Today we'll be talking about if a long game is good or bad and how the length of a game affects it's replay value. So the question is, if I spent over 300+ hours in Skyrim, how willing am I to play that it all over again? Does the story help my decision? Personally if I completed a game to it's fullest or I played it for over 300 hours, unless it had an amazing story I'm probably not going to play it again. Now we use New Game +'s to help encourage players to replay a longer game. Usually these's New Game +'s give a new challenge to the game.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a great example of this. This game can take anywhere from 25-200 hours of gameplay, which is most likely more for someone who really wants to complete every little bit of it. Now if you were to play over 200 hours of this game, why would you want to do it all over again? This game now offers a New Game + option where the player get's bumped up to level 30, if they weren't already there before, but so does every enemy and all treasure. It starts the player off with the same equipment and other items you had in the previous run. When the New Game + was released, fans of the game were thrilled because it motivated them to play the 200 hours worth of game play all over again. Polygon does a great article about the length of The Witcher 3 and how they came about calculating how long it actually was. You can find it here. Even the speedrun for this game is much longer than most games.

Developers are starting to announce game play times to encourage players to try the game out. It seems like a long game will make the game better. It makes a little sense. If a game is longer, then there is more time to develop the story and its characters.

The Rise of Tomb Raider recently announced that the games story will last about 15-20 hours of main story gameplay but the rest of the game including the sidequests, tombs, hunting, and extra collectables will take you about 30-40 hours of full gameplay for the game.

So in conclusion, to answer my own question, yes a games length can sometimes affect a players willingness to replay a game. That being said, game developers have found a way to encourage players to continue replaying their games by implementing New Game +'s, DLC and other extras.

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